In an era when record labels fight the underground, unpaid spread of music tooth-and-nail, and companies like Apple take six years to strip the Digital Rights Management out of their massive online song stores, Reznor seems to have found a fire in non-traditional distribution arrangements. He’s used alternate reality games and secret scavenger hunts to promote new works, and released full CDs under a “pay for it if you feel like it” arrangement. In addition to PDFs of artwork and liner notes, the new albums come with full Creative Commons license arrangements that allow fans to modify, share, and remix the work at their leisure.

One would think Reznor has fallen into a Downward Spiral of economics, but the facts don’t lie: his release of the four-part instrumental album Ghosts I-IV netted the singer/songwriter/geek more than $750,000 in the first three days of its release–even given the fact that fans could legally grab the music for absolutely no cost. In turn, said album became the bestselling MP3 album of 2008 at Amazon.com. And fans have responded to the licensing arrangements in kind, launching full communities of their own for collecting, promoting, and releasing remixed Nine Inch Nails tracks. (For more information on how Reznor accomplished this feat, check out this Creative Commons blog post)

Read the full detail @ Yahoo!

…but with only one record left on its Warner Music Group contract, the group could be planning a digital release along the lines of what Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have done, as ironic as that might seem.

Read more here.